It has become commonplace for histories of architecture to focus on architectural media, from paperwork to drawings, photographs, models and exhibitions, and on architecture as a media complex of buildings, rooms, acoustics, plumbing, and air conditioning. This expanded attention exerts a strong bias toward technological media, derived from media history itself, at the expense of incorporating the often-unruly operations of organic and elemental media. However, the rise of American architectural modernism was inseparable from the confrontation with arboreal infrastructures, distributed mediatic systems that not only made possible but also linked together practices as apparently disparate as colonial surveying and the genetic modification fueling twentieth-century paper plantations. “Pioneers of Modern Architecture,” one essay in a series on architecture’s entanglement with arboreal media, examines the role of architects in managing four billion diseased American chestnut trees as they became the object of Progressive Era botany and the substrate of the Arts and Crafts movement. Architecture, in this account, operated as a primary technique for converting ecological extinction into cultural value, salvaging the chestnut's material and symbolic remains in the service of a nationalism that depended on the very destruction it mourned.
Sylvia Lavin received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. The MIT Press published her first books Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture and Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture and is publishing her forthcoming Arboreal Media and the Making of American Architecture, with the Writing Architecture Series. Lavin’s curatorial projects include Amid the Elements, Venice Biennale 2025, Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths, Canadian Center for Architecture, and Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. She is Professor and Interim Dean of the Princeton University School of Architecture.
